Monday, September 27, 2010

BREAKING NEWS: NBA Elite DELAYED until 2011!

EA Sports' basketball is disintegrating before our eyes. I'm going to need to double my roster efforts because there is going to be a huge implosion of EA gamers into the 2K community.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the way "exclusivity" should be. You don't buy out the license to snuff out the competition like EA did when NFL 2K started to threaten Madden. You dominate the competition into submission.

Now it's up to 2K to not rest on their laurels, because EA will surely be back with a legit game in 2 years.

EDITOR'S NOTE #2: Didn't EA have a launch party for Elite? Wonder how much cheddar copies of a canceled game go for...

10 comments:

Elite will be a good game. It's just that the graphics and animations were pretty crappy. I think there were some glitches as well that they need to fix.

But I'm glad that they at least admitted to their mistake and will now work to make an even better game come 2011.

This is unlike 2k10 where they released the game too early and you couldn't even play online for the first few weeks. By the time 2k figured out all the glitches it was January. So really, the only difference is that Elite is willing to admit that no game can be made in a year.

I didn't mind 2K10 in the early going, it wasn't as bad as previous games like 2K8 and 2K9 which were really unplayable out of box (w/ 2K8 I believe having an auto double team steal).

EA has done this before though, with their baseball franchise. Triple Play was god awful and people started playing World Series Baseball 2K, High Heat, etc. Then they took a year off and made MVP Baseball at a time when 2K had gotten stale while three other games folded (All-Star Baseball, High Heat, and Griffey series). MVP quickly became a hit, and is still revered by many baseball video gamers (though unrightfully so IMO, as it had plenty of glitches that get ignored because the game was at least playable compared to 2K from 2005-2009).

In short they SHOULD be able to put together a half-decent game but as shown with MVP Baseball, you need more than 3 months to scrap an engine and rebuild it from scratch.

"Wow, this is a huge opportunity for 2K, but it sucks for basketball gaming in general. No competition = No new features."

I don't necessarily think that's the case. The Jordan challenges were added because 2K realized from 2K Share that there was a high demand to play as Michael Jordan. This is only going to bring more attention to retro teams, and envelop the fanbase in NBA history.

There's only so much one can do in a basketball game - I don't think there's really many more features they could add to the game aside from continuing to expand on the things they've continued to work on - My Player, association, and gameplay animations.

Oh, and paying me to fix and maintain their ratings. That would be a quality use of the extra cash they're going to generate from this.